Proactive orientation effects on product innovation activities: empirical evidence
Ana Isabel Jiménez-Zarco
Associate Professor, Open University of Catalonia, Economics and Business Studies, Barcelona, Spain
Joan Torrent-Sellens
Associate Professor, Open University of Catalonia, Economics and Business Studies, Barcelona, Spain
María Pilar Martínez-Ruiz
Associate Professor, Área de Comercialización e Investigación de Mercados, Departamento de Administración de Empresas, Facultad de Ciencias Sociales. University of Castilla-La Mancha, Cuenca, Spain
PP: 90 - 106
Abstract
Do the antecedents and outcomes of a proactive market orientation contribute significantly to enable the discrimination of firms according to their product innovation results? An empirical investigation of 2,038 Spanish firms, stratified by sector of activity and size, reveal two interesting conclusions. First, the philosophical principles that determine a proactive market orientation and its strategic implications also foster the development of new products. Second, the firm's sector of activity determines the strength of each antecedent factor. This article therefore provides strategic recommendations for improving the management of innovation processes.
Keywords
Market orientation; ICT use; cooperative relationships; product innovation
Article Text
New product development (NPD) constitutes a key means for modern firms to achieve greater competitiveness and business performance (Oldenboom and Abratt, 2000). However, many new products fail and instead generate significant financial and strategic losses for firms. The risk associated with the NPD process is extremely high, especially when the innovation is radical or includes a new service (Matthing, Saden, and Edvardsson, 2004; Van Riel, Lemmink, and Ouwersloot, 2004). Accordingly, in the past decade, multiple studies have worked to establish a process that leads to NPD success, as well as to identify factors that affect the degree of market success induced by a NPD process (Jiménez-Zarco, Martinez-Ruiz, and Gonzalez-Benito, 2006). However, little research has attempted to identify the factors that might foster or inhibit companies' innovation activity. The lack of research in this area motivates this study; in particular, we seek to identify factors that influence product innovation activity and define their importance for the classification of firms as innovative or not.
Our analytical starting point relies on the concept of market orientation and its particularly proactive dimensions (Narver, Slater, and MacLachlan, 2004). We turn to an extant model to discover the antecedents and outcomes of proactive market orientation, as well as to evaluate the discriminatory power of each factor for differentiating innovative from noninnovative companies. In turn, we analyze a sample of 2,038 Spanish companies of different sizes that function in varying activity sectors to test our series of hypotheses. Finally, we conclude by proposing some strategic recommendations that can facilitate managers' product innovation decision-making processes.
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